7 comments:

Sitting here dozing also, this snapped me to in the way I associate with poetry I like. Now you see it; now you look at it again and look for some more. At some point along the way I realize that I’m still dreaming but I keep following. I love “dog formed.” I read an article yesterday about man’s 30,000 year old bond with dogs. Sometimes I think I let my dogs down by being abstracted and self-involved. They never waver. Curtis

LOL. I love Ron Padgett's poetry and I find him one of the most likeable, admirable humans I have encountered in this life. I have encountered few of his ilk (there are not many) but have encountered so many insane motherfuckers it is a relief to read this poem.

I hope I can get him to send a copy of his new 800 page collected to my other kid who is coming to visit in a few months (an idea that just occurred to me)

I remember seeing you and Ron reading together upstairs at Cody's some (now many) years ago -- maybe the most enjoyable poetry reading I've ever been to. Also having lunch with Ron at Brunetta's on First Avenue (1981, my first trip to New York) which appears in a poem called "Lunch with 'X'," published in New York Notes, my first poetry book ("3.75 for an excellent veal parmigiana the most expensive thing on the menu a minestrone for 1.50") after which we went over to his apartment where "he handed me copies of two of his/ books [maybe from that shelf of "art books along the wall"?] a gentleman and a scholar in every/ way grey hair combed over a short grey beard/ beard he wore faded jeans and a jacket and walked in a tall slow calm sort of/ way. . ."

Steve and Red, many thanks, it seems what we have here (to paraphrase Johnny Keats) is a case of caviare for the cognoscenti.

Steve, I remember that evening well, especially the "trading off" of lines in the delirious collaboration poem "Bun". Indeed every reading I ever did with Ron, going all the way back to the Guggenheim Museum in 1967, was in some way memorable and the memories are all pleasant because Ron is the rare poet who makes audiences laugh (he doesn't laugh before they do, if then, which helps), and that makes him both an impossible and the perfect act to follow.

By the by, in case anyone who strays in here by accident has been trapped on the Planet of the Young...